New dictionary, old dictionary

Hello. Today I bought a dictionary. It’s the 12^th edition Chambers Dictionary. It cost £40, probably the most expensive book I’ve ever bought. I bought it from an independent bookshop called ‘City Books’ in Brighton. Now I can look up all the obscure words in the Azed crossword in the Observer, and I don’t have to endure the sordid, ad-riddled experience of looking them up on the internet.

Here are some excerpts from the ‘word lover’s miscellany’ section in the middle of my new dictionary.

Wonk – a serious or studious person, especially one with an interest in a trivial or unfashionable subject.

Blatherskite – a garrulous talker of nonsense.

Izzard – the letter Z.

Othergates (this word is now extinct) – in another way.

Forswink (this word is almost extinct) – to exhaust by labour.

Anyway, now I have an obsolete Chambers Concise Dictionary, a few years old, and if anyone wants it, just ask. I’d like someone to have it. (shown below in its natural habitat)

Technophobia

‘How to be Really Interesting’ by Steve Davis MBE

This book belonged to my dad. He has doodled on the cover with a biro, shading in the letters and signing his name. When I was young, I saw this as permission for me to similarly deface it - if dad’s allowed to draw on it, then so am I, it’s only fair. I have written my name alongside the right forearm of Steve Davis the boxer and above his left shoulder I have written the word ‘time’. I had only just learnt how to spell this word. I must have been very young, but I remember enjoying the way the magic ‘e’ on the end changes the sound of the ‘i’. My brother Ben has signed his name on the back cover in imitation of my dad’s signature, and my brother Joe, the youngest, has written his name above the right shoulder of besuited Steve Davis. The 'J' is backwards.

Looking at the scrappy biroed cover of this book, I become a detective of the past. My dad’s distracted doodles tell a cryptic story. They were probably made in the evening after work with the television on in the background, my mum knitting in the armchair, in the garish early nineties living room amongst neon clothing, perms and bowl-cuts, red grouting between the tiles in the kitchen, brown furry sofa, pink roobled carpet, Ghostbusters lunch boxes.

It was the perfect size for leaning on when writing something – doing a crossword, demonstrating maths or perhaps drawing something for me. If I examine the cover closely I can see the imprints of numbers and letters and lines, and the surface is creased like the wrinkles on a hand. It’s not a bulky heavy hardback, it’s a flimsy in-between, but gives just enough resistance to support the concerted ballpoint pressure, and this proximity to unsheathed biro led to its defacement.

I wonder when the line was crossed, the taboo broken. Which was the first pen mark made on the shiny cover?

My guess is that this book was a present for my dad. It was published in 1988. It’s a first edition and could conceivably be worth a some money if it wasn’t for the widespread biro defacement, but without these details it would have much less cultural, personal value.

The Inevitable Digital Future

Let us consider for a moment the future. The tendency in the world of books seems to be towards complete digitalisation. One day, maybe a hundred years from now, the paper book will more than likely be obsolete. A hundred years is a long time. It’s practically impossible to imagine such a distant future, but let us try anyway. Let us make some estimations based on the cultural tendencies of the present. 

How many of the things that exist in our world can we replace by things that aren’t there, by computer data? There’s no stopping us, really. Experiences need not be actually experienced, they can be virtually experienced in a digital environment, just like music is listened to now in a digital environment, without the presence of a CD or a band. We know, of course, when we listen to a recording, that the band isn’t there in the room, it’s just a reproduction of the experience of listening to the band live. Perhaps in the future this principle will extend to other experiences like visiting a different country. And someone will say to you, ‘so you’ve been to Argentina? But have you been there live? You should go there live, it’s much better.’

Or you will meet someone on the internet and the bodysuit you wear that is covered with nanochip sensors will communicate to you direct reproductions of the feelings of touch you would experience if you were actually there shaking his hand or stroking her back. It will be essentially, sensibly identical. When the technology arrives, some will say, ‘it’s just not the same!’ but the younger generation will take to it like there is nothing at all strange about it and they will feed on the glorious ease of it all, the convenience. With each generation there are new technologies that we inure ourselves to, leaving the older generations confused and angry. This trend WILL continue.

In this context it’s not so hard to imagine a world without books. We can confidently say that within a century or so, books will be a rarity, reserved for specialist collectors, antique collectors. As they are outmoded, millions of books will be recycled. People will leave boxes and boxes of them outside in the streets by the bins, as the charity shops stop accepting them as donations. There will be desperate conservation projects that seek to save these books, place them in vast warehouses. Books, paper books that is, will be museum pieces. The libraries of Oxford and Cambridge will struggle to justify their existence, as the people who regularly use the bulky paper collections, die out.

There is no doubt that this is the beginning of the end.

The reflex reactions of a booklover

The idea of an electronic book was to me instantly unappealing. For a while it was possible to ignore it, but then there came the news that for the first time a book, who knows what is was, had sold more copies as an ebook than as a physical book. It was around Christmas. I remember sitting on the sofa discussing it with my Nan, and I remember feeling dread at the news. It was the omen of a trend destined to continue. It was the beginning of an end. I’m sure there are many people who have reacted in the same way. What are the reasons we can give for this feeling?

The book, that universal ubiquitous object, that symbol of so much, how could it be replaced by something as cold and sterile as pixels on a computer screen. How could anyone read a whole book on a computer screen? It just wouldn’t feel nice on the eyes. Is there a way of objectively measuring the stress on the eyes of reading a book on a computer screen as opposed to paper? Even if there is, the more general issue is probably not going to be objectively decided either way, and perhaps that wouldn’t be the most important thing anyway. More important is what people think, what this human race makes of it and how this human race deals with the new version of the book we are presented with.

When I try to find solid reasons why the paper book is better than the electronic version, I struggle. It’s difficult for any of these reasons to not be attributed to force of life-long habit. Here’s an attempt anyway:

Reading a real book is a more involved experience, it’s more of an experience, there are more sensations involved. And surely an experience that communicates more sensory information and thus opportunity for sensory pleasure, must be of more worth? Real books give you the satisfying touch of the paper as you turn another page, to mark each small achievement, and if indeed every page read is an achievement of sorts, then this achievement needs to be celebrated. The feeling of the rough page on your fingers has more saliency than the touch of a button.  Is this important? Or is this all merely sentiment? On the surface, yes it may seem like sentiment but these things matter. These things have latent effects. However, such effects may be overpowered by other influences, like for instance the immense convenience of having many books in one light, portable kindle-type thing. And only such a cursory concession to the electronic book reveals its immediate practical benefits and how easy it is to promote to a young, progressive, future-oriented global society. This worries me. How do I find a way to rationalise my aversion to the electronic book? And if I can’t find a way, then maybe I should think about revising that opinion.

Aims of Pixelled Wheels Clunk Up Hills

It is the year 2012 and we must stop and examine the technology that has enveloped our culture.

We are firmly placed in the digital age and the ways in which we consume and create art and literature have become increasingly digital in their nature. We are moving away from physical objects and towards portable, virtual, computerized versions.

The aim of this blog is to examine these new media and in particular the electronic book, to see what arguments we can find for and against them. We begin with the standpoint of a natural aversion to the replacement of paper books by digital versions on a computer screen, but we insist on remaining open-minded and intend to investigate every viewpoint on the subject of this and other obsolescent media, to either form a complete and cohesive conclusion as to why the electronic book is a portent of doom, or indeed otherwise.

Below we shall offer all our thoughts and the fruits of our studies on the subject of obsolescent physical media.

Written by Thom Punton BA and Steven Newman M.Phil.